User blog:AnnaBannana/Elona and Translations
So, did you know? Essentially every item in Elona has a cool little description in the Japanese version that never got put into the English release. No, no, I'm not talking about the small little blurbs like "An alchoholic beverage made from crimberry." that you can see when inspecting a bottle of crim ale. The Japanese version has those too, of course, but what I'm talking about is an entirely seperate bit of flavor text that's tagged on to every item in the game. Typically, these are attributed to some type of organization or similar (such as to the "Irva Fantasy Encyclopedia" for static artifact descriptions). Some of them even contain quotes from various characters from Elona's story! For instance, the translation of the Diablo 's description... Pretty interesting, huh? Or, of course, perhaps you don't think that flavor text is really all that exciting. That's an understandable position - it doesn't really impact the gameplay whatsoever. But for some of us, that flavor text adds a lot to the experience! It's a shame that content never made it into the English release, though considering that the translators were doing it just as fans, and given the amount of text in Elona, it's understandable. And, of course, it's only natural that most of the Elona+ content doesn't have English translations. Oh, did I forget to mention? Some(?) of the enemies in the game have descriptions too. Now, I say some, since I'm not sure where these descriptions are actually pulled from, and it's possible it only applies to Elona+ enemies. Kasarn has added some of them to the wiki, though. I thought going by the tagging here that they would appear when e(x)amining enemy cards in the game, but they all display the same flavor text. Odd. Regardless, it's there, and it's pretty cool too. And, of course, let's not forget that the main story never made it into the English release. Yes, yes, we have the quests from the player's perspective, but not the cutscenes where the real meat of the story is. Of course, there is a translated synopsis on the elona squares forum, which will tell you the main gist behind the events that are happening while we venture around Irva. Wouldn't it be nice though if we could have the dialogue too? So, what's the point of this blog post? The point is, essentially, that I'd like to add all this missing content to the wiki - or at least, as much as I can. Now, there's a ton of text in Elona. Really, even if it might not seem like it on the surface, the amount of text in the game, between flavor text, quest text, and so on, is really quite high. And, unfortunately, I'm already out in the working world, doing 60 hour work weeks. So, I admit, I'm a bit slow. Even in the spare time I do have, I don't always feel like translating. I've got other things I'd like to do, yeah? In other words, don't expect it to be done in anything resembling "quickly". Now, I have to admit - I only had a year of formal studies in Japanese. For the most part, I'm self-taught. I've never taken the JLPT, and I probably never will. Why am I saying all this? Well, I'll probably make mistakes here and there. And of course, I'm sorry for any that make it through. But don't be afraid to point them out to me if you see them. I'd like for things to be as accurate as possible, so don't worry: I won't take it badly. But, I will try. And for those of you who are interested in these type of things, I hope you'll follow along with me too. Category:Blog posts